Cable Recovery With Overrun

Cable is normally recovered by hauling in from ahead, with the cable guiding the ship. In an early paper, Zajac presented a method for recovery, proposed by Shea, in which the cable is overrun, and hauled in tending aft. The potential advantage is lower tension in recovery. Cable was recovered with overrun in two recent exercises. The tensions and cable angles observed at the ship in these exercises are used to work out cable configurations and bottom tensions. The calculations show that the bottom tension was considerably less than it is for normal recovery in both exercises. As the overrun is increased, the tension decreases, and tends to a limiting value defined by the ship speed and the slack rate at which the cable was originally laid. Recovery with overrun is practical and advantageous.